1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus which provides printing setting functions as to document data generated by a document process program, for example, and the method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
When working with different data types, such as text, charts, images, the configurations defining such data or the editing operations as to such data differ, and accordingly various application programs according to the type of the various types of data are provided. Accordingly, a user may be required to use different applications for each type of data such as a text processing program to edit text, a spreadsheet program to edit charts, and an image editing program to edit images.
Thus, generally the user uses an application program corresponding to the type of data. However, rather than documents configured with one type of data such as text only, charts only, or images only, documents handled are generally configured with multiple types of data such as text and charts, or text and images. Thus, in order to create document including multiple types of data, the user needs to use printing function provided by each application, employ each application to print each data type, and combine the printed material manually in a desired sequence to create the desired document.
Alternatively, according to a program forming one integrated application from various types of applications, called an office suite for example, a function is provided to combine data generated with various applications to configure one document. By using the integrated application, the user can aggregate the data created with various applications into one document by the specific application included in the integrated application (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-58563).
Also, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-174226 discloses a technique wherein, in order to resolve printing setting conflicts, the item generated by the conflict and an item without conflict are identifiably displayed.
With such an integrated application according to the related art, data editing, placement, and even setting printing specifying settings, can be performed while confirming with a preview display or the like, without needing to actually print the document combined into one document.
However, with currently-used integrated applications, in the case that a printer is selected which does not correspond to the integrated application, the integrated application has no way to correctly obtain and control all of the function information of the printer. Therefore, the integrated application may not be able to issue print instructions for functions the integrated application cannot obtain or cannot control.
Accordingly, in the case that a printer is selected which does not correspond to the integrated application, the integrated application may not instruct all of the functions as to the non-corresponding printer. Therefore, for functions which cannot be specified by the integrated application, the user may need to open a printer driver setting screen and perform settings, reducing ease of operation for the user.
Also, in the case that the setting items set by the user via the setting screen of the printer driver and the setting items set by using the integrated application are duplications, the output results may have problems. For example, in the case that binding printing is set in both of the integrated application and printer driver, both execute imposition processing for binding printing, so the user may not obtain the desired printing results.
That is to say, in the case that the printer which the user selected to use is a printer which does not correspond to the integrated application, not only does this cause additional work, but also settings operations for obtaining printed material similar to the preview display with the integrated application may be difficult.